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Hardly ridiculous. You say that as if members of US government agencies didn't plot terror attacks on Americans (Operation Northwood), steal the medical record
by AimHere 2y ago
Hardly ridiculous.
You say that as if members of US government agencies didn't plot terror attacks on Americans (Operation Northwood), steal the medical records of American whistleblowers (Ellsberg), had to be prevented from assassinating American journalists (Gordon Liddy, on Jack Anderson), collude to assassinate American political activists (Fred Hampton), spy on presidential candidates (Watergate), sell weapons to countries who'd allegedly supported groups who'd launched suicide bombing attacks on American soldiers (Iran-Contra), allow drug smugglers to flood the USA with cocaine so that they could supply illegal guns to terrorists abroad on their return trip (Iran-Contra again) and get caught conducting illegal mass-surveillance on American people as a whole (Snowden). Among others.
It's super-naive to suggest that government agencies wouldn't act against the interest of American citizens and companies because there might be consequences if they were caught. Most of the instances above actually were instances where the perpetrators did get caught, which is why we know about them.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI love being called naive.
- QuantumG 2y agoWhisper it to me lover.
- SadTrombone 2y agoSeems like an appropriately used descriptor here.
- jonathankoren 2y agoYou don’t even have to be this conspiratorially minded to believe the NSA is a legitimate suspect here. (For the record, I think literally every intelligence agency on Earth is plausible here.) You kind of lost the thread when you say, “act against the interests of American citizens and companies”. Bro, literally anyone could be using xz, and anyone could be using Red Hat. You’re only “acting against Americans” if you use it against Americans. I don’t know who was behind this, but a perfectly plausible scenario would be the NSA putting the backdoor in with an ostensibly Chinese login and then activating on machines hosted and controlled by people outside of the US. Focusing on a specific distro is myopic. Red Hat is popular.
- Dalewyn 2y ago[flagged]
- cesarb 2y ago> but a perfectly plausible scenario would be the NSA putting the backdoor in with an ostensibly Chinese login and then activating on machines hosted and controlled by people outside of the US. There's a term for that: NOBUS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS). It won't surprise me at all if this backdoor can only be exploited if the attacker has the private key corresponding to a public key contained in the injected code. It also won't surprise me if this private key ends up being stolen by someone else, and used against its original owner.
- jonathankoren 2y ago>It also won't surprise me if this private key ends up being stolen by someone else, and used against its original owner. And that is exactly why backdoored encryption is bad.
- eastern 2y ago100%. The HN crowd has come a long way from practically hero-worshipping Snowden to automatically assuming that 'state actor' must mean the countries marked evil by the US.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- onthecanposting 2y agoCaught and, more importantly, nothing bad typically happened to anyone involved. Also worth noting that there is probably a survivorship bias in play.